Thursday, August 18, 2011

Yachty Totty at Cowes Week

Triple P has had a request for more yachty totty (or is it yachtie tottie?) so here are some pictures we took at Cowes. We are just back from Cowes Week, the world's biggest yachting regatta, where the scenery was enlived by the usual influx of Sloane Rangers down to race or, more likely, just watch and shop whilst Giles, Dominic, Jonty, Hugo etc. raced.

Equally inevitably, busloads of local "talent" (we use the term loosely and loose is as good a description as any) arrive at the Red Jet terminal on the number 1 bus from Newport every night in ridiculously high heels and short skirts looking for likely looking men who can buy them drinks. They are usually ludicrously over made up in the hope that people won't recognise the fact that ther are mostly under age.

The local girls, we are sorry to report, may have good figures (some of them really do) and nice brown legs (the Isle of Wight has a better sunshine record than most of the rest of Britain) but can be less attractive than their "overner" sisters.

Now there are some pretty girls from the island; Triple P worked with one many years ago who was quite gorgeous, but, on the whole, they largely fall down in the face department. This is because there is a recognisable Isle of Wight profile, where the slope of the forehead continues straight into the nose, giving them the same profile as a Norman helmet. There is, we are afraid, something vaguely Neanderthal about it.

It may well be because they are more inbred; given the surprising lack of adventurous spirit as regards travelling off the island to the mainland (or the North Island as they refer to it). Even travelling from, say, Bembridge in the east to Yarmouth in the west (about twenty miles) is viewed as something akin to HM Stanley's expedition down the Congo.

Anyway, some of these young ladies may be locals but we suspect that most of them are not. The local girls tended to appear at twilight (they are very much crepescular creatures) when the light was too poor for photography.

This specimen demonstrates the "just off the Red Jet" (fast catamaran from Southampton) look, with no effort made to dress like a yachty as yet.

Soon, no doubt, she will look like this.

Shorts were very much the thing this year (not surprisingly for a sailing event) but the new development was the ubiquity of denim shorts which, unusually, were adopted by the local "shazzers" as well as the yachties. Shazzers, for our overseas readers, is a derogatory term in the UK derived from the name Sharon as Sloanes believe that most lower class girls are called either Sharon or Tracy.

One ridiculous aspect of some of the denim shorts on display was that they were obviously cut-off jeans and, therefore, had the pocket linings hanging down below the hem of the shorts. This, we feel, looks just ludicrous!

Denims are not really the thing for Cowes Week (they don't work with salt water very well) but we thought this young lady (below) carried off her skinny jeans very effectively. Of course nicely toned thighs work wonders.

The more authentic sailing look is better exemplified by these two. The "blonde" hair, as can be seen by looking at most of the other examples in this post is, of course, de rigeur.

Finally, it was pretty windy this year which is excellent for sailing (although we admit to sitting out the 48 knot winds on one of the days in the second half of the week in favour of cooking a coq au vin) but not so good for encouraging girls to strip off and sunbathe.

Away from Cowes, in a rather more sheltered spot down the coast, we did come across these two fine examples decorating a motor boat. Motor boat girls are different in many ways from their wind propelled cousins and we may examine them another day if, as seems likely, we return for the Cowes-Torquay-Cowes powerboat race.